thumb|SantaCon in San Francisco, 2014 SantaCon is an annual pub crawl in which people dressed in Santa Claus costumes or as other Christmas characters parade in hundreds of cities around the world. The event has sometimes been characterized by drunken behavior, sparking community resistance.
thumb|SantaCon in San Francisco, 2014 SantaCon is an annual pub crawl in which people dressed in Santa Claus costumes or as other Christmas characters parade in hundreds of cities around the world. The event has sometimes been characterized by drunken behavior, sparking community resistance.
==Origins== SantaCon began in San Francisco in 1994, inspired by a Mother Jones article on the Danish activist theatre group Solvognen. In 1974, Solvognen gathered dozens of "Santas" in Copenhagen to hand out items from the shelves of a department store to customers as "presents" before they were arrested. Staged as street theater by a local prankster group, the Cacophony Society – which had grown out of the earlier Suicide Club – the aim was to make fun of Christmas and the rampant consumerism associated with the holiday. Originally called Santarchy and influenced by the Surrealist movement, Discordianism, and other subversive art currents, it was not intended to be a recurrent event. However, the event occurred again in San Francisco in 1995 as a Cacophony Society event with 100 participants and at least two arrests.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).